Discoveries: Essays in Literary Criticism

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By Listen TheBook Posted on Jan 28, 2024

In Category - *Non-fiction, Literary Criticism

Authors: John Middleton Murry In Year : 1924

Book Language: English

Audiobook: Discoveries: Essays in Literary Criticism

The Nature of Poetry
The Significance of Russian Literature
Anton Tchehov
Marcel Proust
The Break-Up of the Novel
English Poetry in the Eighteenth Century
A Note on the Madness of Christopher Smart
Poe's Poetry
Matthew Arnold the Poet
English Prose in the Nineteenth Century
The Creation of Falstaff
Coriolanus
Flaubert and Flaubart

Introductory Note: I have called these essays and lectures by a title that some people may think presumptuous: first, because it is the title of a book by Ben Jonson, and second, because it could be interpreted as meaning that I think there is something final in the results of these explorations of mine. For the first, I believe the fine ghost of Ben Jonson will forgive me. For the second, I do not believe there is anything final in criticism, But I wanted my title to contain a suggestion of the curious elation which criticism sometimes brings to me. " To me," I insist, because I subscribe wholeheartedly to the famous dictum of Anatole France that criticism is the adventures of a man's soul among books and more criticism appears to me to be an intensely personal affair. Every honest critic and by an honest critic I mean a man who builds his schemes and classifications solely on the basis of his own reactions makes a great cross-section of the universe of literature in accordance with his temperament. What he is and believes is more surely reflected in his criticism than in his direct professions of faith. The more he can lose himself in the object, the more himself he is. And the excitement of losing oneself in exploration, the elation of being possessed by the very process of discovery, is the most precious thing I have found in criticism. (Summary by author)